This article examines the relatively widespread trend toward racial residential integration within suburbs in the 21st century across metropolitan areas in the United States. I investigate the racial and ethnic compositions of stably integrated communities as well as the characteristics that distinguish these places. Using the information theory index (H) among stably diverse places, I identify cities and suburbs that were racially integrated between 2000 and 2010. Integrated places cluster in highly diverse, coastal metropolitan areas and almost entirely within suburbs. Moreover, integration is firmly patterned along racial lines. Reflecting the antiblack nature of segregation in the US, the rate of black-white integration remains remarkably low (10.5%), but in multiethnic communities with Asians and Latinxs, the probability of black-white integration nearly quadruples (40.1%). Several critical features of place are positively associated with integration: military and public sector employment as well as public university enrollment; new housing stock; and metropolitan political fragmentation. This study shows that suburbs are at the leading edge of American diversification and integration and illuminates the existence of communities where American society transgresses persistent forms of racial discrimination.

Although it is clear that the 2020 election broke turnout records, we do not know how levels of voting changed across income groups. Journalistic accounts emphasized increases in turnout across demographic groups but relied on self-reported voter data. The authors use validated voting data from both the Common Election Study and the Pew Research Center to examine the relationship between income and voting across the two elections (along with education and race in supplemental analyses ). The authors show that levels of inequality in political participation were the same or higher in 2020 compared with previous years and that there are substantial differences in coefficients for income between the two data sets, raising questions about the accuracy of validated voter data.

The majority of Blacks, Latinxs, Asians, and whites now live in suburbs in the United States. Concurrently, the majority of the nation’s poor also live in suburbs. These trends suggest that the diversification of suburbs has immense consequences for the geography of racial (in)equality. Using Census data, we ask whether racial residential diversification and integration disproportionately occur in advantaged or disadvantaged suburban contexts. We conceptualize diversity as the racial and ethnic composition of a place; a suburb is highly diverse if it contains multiple racialized groups represented in equal proportions. We conceptualize integration as the spatial arrangements of racialized groups—a place is integrated when different racialized groups live near each other. We find that suburbs with higher levels of racial diversity are more disadvantaged than more racially homogeneous places. At the same time, integrated suburbs are substantially more advantaged than the average suburb independent of levels of diversity. This work contributes to a nascent critical research agenda on racial processes in U.S. suburbs by providing insight into the socioeconomic conditions and potential outcomes of racial diversification and integration.